6. Duke Ellington - Duke Ellington at Newport (1956)

CD 1: Star-Spangled Banner//Farmer Norman O'Connor introduces the Duke & Orchestra; Duke introduces Tune and Anderson, Jackson & Procope//Black and Tan Fantasy//Duke Introduces Cook & Tune//Tea for Two//Duke & Band leave stage; Father Norman O'Connor talks about the festival//Take the 'A' Train//Duke announces Strayhorn's & Nance; Duke introduces Festival Suite, Part I & Hamilton//Part I - Festival Junction (Live)//Duke announces soloists; introduces Part II (Live)//Part II - Blues to Be There (Live)// Duke announces Nance and Procope; introduces Part III (Live)//Part III - Newport Up (Live)//Duke announces Hamilton, Gonsalves, & Terry; Duke introduces Carny & Tune (Live)//Sophisticated Lady (Live)//Duke announces Grissom & Tune (Live)//Day In, Day Out (Live)//Duke introduces Tunes and Paul Gonsalves Interludes (Live)//Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue (Live)//Announcements, Pandemonium (Live)//Pause

CD 2: Duke Introduces Johnny Hodges//I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)//Jeep's Blues//Duke calms crowd; introduces Nance and Tune//Tulip or Turnip//Riot Prevention//Skin Deep//Mood Indigo//Studio Concert//Father Norman O'Connor introduces Ellington; Ellington introduces New Work Part I//Part I - Festival Junction//Duke announces soloists; introduces Part II//Part II - Blues to Be There//Duke announces Nance and Procope; introduces Part III//Part III - Newport Up//Duke announces Hamilton, Gonsalves & Terry; Pause; Duke introduces Johnny Hodges; I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)// Jeep's Blues//Pause

Ellington’s career was more or less on the out in 1956. He was still good, and his band was still good – the new material debuted on this album shows that - but public interest simply wasn’t there. Two reasons are usually cited for this. On the one hand, big bands had been losing ground to individual singers since the 40s, until the point where they were more or less restricted to novelty acts. On the other, be-bop had hit, and jazz fans were being polarised to the point where the genre was becoming an intellectual rather than a popular pursuit. Complex, befuddling art may be great and all, but it seldom makes enough money to keep a touring unit of over twenty musicians in bread and board. Furthermore, Ellington was, let’s face it, a little out of his depth. His style of elaborately orchestrated, poppy composition had been groundbreaking and influential in its day, wasn’t the sort of thing that could be easily reconfigured into an Ornette Coleman track. His rhythm section couldn’t touch the fiery afro-Cuban grooves of Dizzy Gillespie. And after thirty years in the business, he maybe just didn’t have it in him to change it up. Isn't that the case? Obviously! Or:

The first half of this set doesn’t sound like a career-saving performance. It sounds like a very good performance by a band in top form, but not earth shattering. “Star Spangled Banner” is eerie and vaguely out of tune, and it’s the better for it. “Tea for Two” is modest but charming. After only two short tracks (one a rather unimpressive vocal) the band had to leave the stage due to missing personnel, but they came back later that night with a solid rendition if “Take the ‘A’ Train”, Duke’s signature tune as written by right-hand man Billy Strayhorn, who had returned to the fold after a brief stint as a solo artist and composer. Duke’s piano’s pretty decent here, I’ll admit, but the wonderful parping chorus is what really sells it.

“‘A’ Train” is followed by a wonderful three-part suite written especially for the festival. Ellington jokingly christens it “Festival Junction” on the spot. The first part is rather driving, opening with a strong theme pounded-out in chords on the piano. Then it swings into a lengthy, meandering section that eventually builds along some able support soloing up to a wonderful mournful solo on trumpet. This is thoroughly old-fashioned stuff, obviously – for a few moments at the start it looks like Duke is hinting at something more modern behind his piano, but then it slams straight into an old-time swing groove. The song closes out on a great trumpet solo right up into the mic as the backing drops-out, climbing up on a few ludicrous squeals to impressive heights.

The second part is far more subdued, coasting on a ride cymbal and some delicate syncopated piano work from Duke. “Blues to Be There” is appropriately almost more blues than jazz (again, incredibly old-fashioned) and it highlights the truth in Ellington’s reputation for refinement and sophistication. All in all, it’s very pretty, though more mood-oriented at first than immediately engaging. The clarinet work here is gorgeous. The backing drops out halfway for a brief scale, and then bam, back into the main theme on piano and some more New Orleans-style wah-wah trumpet, swaying into a beautiful swing section on the horns, consisting of little more than a few rising and falling notes. It’s at this point the band starts coming into its own, swinging into the rousing, up-tempo “Newport Up”, obviously geared with its brisk four-four towards a festival crowd. The trumpet tone here is very warm and tight, and quite lovely, but there’s not much to say aside from it being a very nicely done dance piece. The crowd reaction is enthusiastic, but modest.

“Sophisticated Lady” is all delicate reds and oranges and some lovely piano work – I do like the way Ellington cops so much from Debussy. It’s a charming rendition, complete with little stuttering horn riffs through the verse and a gently slide-out on the ride cymbal. Another vocal number follows, and it’s another modest success.

I suppose, if there’s been one problem up to this point it’s anyone who knows what’s coming. Up to this point, Ellington at Newport has been a very fine live document, easily up to many bands’ studio standards. With “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue” however, it leaps across to another level entirely. This is the famous bit – the solo by Paul Gonsalves that lasts a dizzying 27 choruses. Apparently they’d been experimenting with this for a while – the two halves of the song were always linked by a solo by Gonsalves, and the general idea was that he would just go out there and see what happened. This is the point where the night caught fire. The song dropped down to nothing but piano, bass and drums while Gonsalves carried the tune with his fine, simple soloing, until eventually everybody was crying out for him to keep it going like lunatics. It’s a strange moment that sort of creeps up on you. The solo starts, and it goes on for a bit, and then it just keeps on going, and the song become one long groove. The drums get heavier, accenting the rhythm with heavy crashes, and the piano starts pounding out a rudimentary groove before the song erupts into the brassy “Crescendo” (and Gonsalves presumably collapses of exhaustion). It’s a great deal of fun listening in on this moment. It’s a hell of a performance and enough alone to warrant getting this. The band put in everything they’ve got. Hell! It supposedly pulled a hot blonde in a cocktail dress from the crowd to start dancing, at a wimpy jazz concert in 1956. Listen to it loud.

Next up is “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)”, a fine number that Charles Mingus ripped-off for the “Alice” track from Mingus in Wonderland. It’s a showcase for Johnny Hodges on sax, and he does a great job. ‘Jeep’s Blues” is a big, brassy, swinging number with a great clarinet part. But even after this, the crowd didn’t want the set to end, and so we get “Tulip or Turnip”, which is a strong blues number and inarguably the best vocal performance on the album. The crowd hoot and holler through the whole thing, of course. They pile horns on horns and it’s a wonderful track. At this point they’ve largely ditched refinement and are going for the gut.

When this ended, the festival managers tried to shut the gig down. Ellington had Sam Woodyard play “Skin Deep”. This is, I’d argue, the absolute best track on here, and one of the most amazing drum tracks I’ve heard. It starts-out insane exotic horn stings and then turns into a thunderstorm of drums. Almost nothing but drums! Beautiful, amazing drums! If you know me, you know I love rhythm, and the one problem I have with Ellington on this album is his rather anaemic (at times) rhythm section. The moment where Woodyard’s double basses burst out from a series of random afro-Cuban patterings into an utterly heavenly syncopated groove is utterly breathtaking. And then it builds, at the end, to a crushing crescendo. It’s god damn beautiful.

I feel a little bad, on an album by such a man who was such a consummate composer and a generous band-leader, praising above all a really good drum solo. But, hey, that’s just how I roll. This whole album is damn solid, ranging from good to excellent. It’s damned long, but it never really feels it. When Ellington says goodbye, you’ll be howling no allowing with the folks in the audience on tape.

Of course, I haven’t even talked about the second disc. You see, having praised this album, there are now some rather knotty problems to untangle. Back in 1956, Ellington recorded this concert and then decided to release it as a live album, fair enough. But the recording quality wasn’t up to scratch. As a consequence, the band went into the studio following the festival and rerecorded sections of their performance to patch-up the holes. In the original recording, for example, you can’t even hear Gonsalves’ solo, since he played his trumpet into the wrong microphone. Well, that’s a problem, but only because a few years ago the folks at Columbia found a better quality recording of the night, one in which you can actually hear Gonsalves, and spliced it digitally with the original masters. As a consequence, we have here before us an excellent quality, stereo recording of the night – from a couple of years before stereo even debuted!.

The question is, which version do I review? I’ve already covered the live version, so that obviously predisposes my decision, but I will say a few words on the 1956 re-recording just to make sure that my reviews remain impossibly, tediously long.

We get a few pretty runs at “Festival Junction”, all of them greatly aided by being in the studio, and then we get the album proper, which consists of overdubbing audience noise and recreated stage banter onto the rerecorded set. The banter seems painfully stilted, and the album sounds like it was recorded in a concert hall rather than on a festival stage – although in the days before high fidelity stereo this may not have been a problem. We also lose “Diminuendo & Crescendo”, “Skin Deep” and “Tulip or Turnip” due to poor audio quality and the time constraints of the LP format. Other than that, though, it’s mostly the same album. It’s the same songs, anyway, and it’s still very fine. Large parts of the Festival suit have been re-done, but while the live versions are more energetic, the delicacy of “Blues to Be There”, for example, really shines on the studio cut. It’s easy to see why this, combined with the buzz generated by headlines regarding the ruckus at Newport, would reinvigorate interest in Ellington. This studio re-recording is an absolute gem – the performances argubaly better than the live version, if only because it captures approximately similar performances, but with far better recording quality and the tightness allowed by the studio environment. It’s wonderful! Christ, the soprano sax on “Newport Up”! The trumpet. You can harp about being genuine all you like – fraudulence gets results. The man was looking to salvage a career – would you risk a raw live cut or put everything you had into making yourself look like slickest bastard who ever tinkled an ivory? Everything hits harder! It just, you know, sounds better. As a studio recording should. And anyway, this is the album that’s been dazzling people for forty years.

So, it’s very hard to pick a favourite of the two, but in the end I’d argue that the original cut has the edge in polish, but the live recording matches it with energy, fascinating on-the-spot embellishments, and with the wider song selection, principally “America the Beautiful” and the two longer cuts missing from the LP. No matter how much nicer the studio versions sound, they can’t invalidate that drum solo and that amazing trumpet marathon. In any event, no matter how you cut it this is one of the best jazz albums I’ve ever heard. It was enough to bring a man back from the dead.

9/10

Download: Duke Ellington - Skin Deep.mp3

5. Fats Domino - This Is Fats (1956)

Tracks: Blueberry Hill//Honey Chile//What's the Reason//Blue Monday//So Long//La-La//Troubles of My Own//You Done Me Wrong//Reeling & Rocking//The Fat Man's Hop//Poor Me//Trust In Me

It’s a rock and roll album, but you wouldn’t really describe it as rockin'. This is a very laid-back and soulful affair. It’s more... cheery, than anything. The Barry White to Little Richard's Funkadelic. Fats Domino was one of the earlier pioneers of rock music, and it seems like by this album he still hadn’t got around to updating his style from the late 40s. This album is tacked together from singles recorded across the fifties, but remains stylistically extremely coherent nonetheless. All but one of the tracks is piano-led, most of them have a saxophone take the chorus. Honestly, it’s difficult to pick which tracks would have been recorded when just by listening.

So. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Fats is doing something interesting here, and he does it well. He has a simple, relaxed style built-up around blues and pop with very strong gospel influences, and he marries that to a steady, gently swinging rock beat and lets the song carry itself on his pleasant crooning and distinctive, pulsing piano playing. “Blueberry Hill” is a fine example of this, very nice crooning R&B - an utterly lovelyl song, almost lighter than air. A few peppier numbers emerge to shake things up a bit, and he gets the horns out regularly to crank up the soul (although I suppose soul music as such didn’t really exist at this point – Fats and his ilk were busy creating it). Having said this, he does manage to work quite a bit of variety into what is a relatively restrictive format. “Reelin’ & Rockin’” stands-out the most from the crowd. The layers of horns and piano are stripped off and it rides a steady swinging beat, a proto-surf guitar and a tambourine that just won’t stop. It’s completely non-threatening, but it’s danceable and a lot of fun – I get the impression that a live show with Fats would have been pretty wild, but the records are for better part a family affair.

“The Fat Man’s Hop” is another stand-out – a straight-up blues instrumental, with the melody carried on the saxophone. “Trust In Me”, conversely, is a full-blown, honest to god rock & roll song. It’s got a repeating horn groove over which Fats croons, and an amazing display of folk-influenced electric guitar bubbling away like something from a Django Rheinhardt song over the top. It’s probably the only song that comes close to dropping the “restrained” qualifier from it, although to be fair standards were different back then and audio recording was not always at a great level. “What’s The Reason (I’m Not Pleasing You)” has an infectious little groove carried by slowly rising horn bends, and some funny little lyrics. In fact the lyrics on this album are all quite nice – there’s nothing earth shattering about them, but they’re often fairly funny. The choruses on “Blue Monday” build up to a modest crescendo on the strength of some nice stuttering drum breaks. It’s a pretty simple song about Mondayitis, but it’s not half bad. “So Long” is in a similar vein, but has a more delicate bridge carried by some beautiful saxophone playing.

There’s not much point going into depth with this album. You’d probably got a fair idea of what it sounds like. This is, blessedly, far more the antecedent of something like Stevie Wonder than Steven Tyler, you might say. Fats Domino was massively successful in his time, and there’s something so darn fun about the pleasant, positive music on this album that makes you see exactly why. Most of the songs aren’t immediately mind-blowing, but it has understated charm and a suitable danceability. The mix of R&B and rock is also a wonderful sign of things to come in the next decade - everything from the Shangri-Las to Sam Cooke to Curtis Mayfield and Nancy Sinatra. It's a goddamn blueprint for soul and R&B. And it’s great! Kids can make-out to it and grandparents can drink tea and talk about the war. Fun for the whole family.

I really like this. It’s... graceful.

8/10

Download: Fats Domino - Blueberry Hill.mp3

4. Louis Prima - The Wildest (1957)

Tracks: Just a Gigolo; I Ain't Got Nobody (Medley)//(Nothing's Too Good) For My Baby//The Lip//Body and Soul//Oh Marie//Basin Street Blues; When It's Sleepy Time Down South (Medley)//Jump, Jive an' Wail//Buona Sera//Night Train//(I'll Be Glad When You're Dead) You Rascal You

Well this is a fun album! It’s all very silly of course, but it’s a catchy mix of early rock with good old fashion swing and New Orleans jazz. And it makes sense, doesn’t it – I mean, at this point all three of those things sounded suspiciously similar anyway, so hey, why not mix them up?

Louis Prima is comparable on all fronts to Louis Armstrong, right down to the name. His voice is obviously modelled very heavily on Armstrong, including the deep gravely quality and his frequent explosions into bursts of scat singing and silly repartee with the sidemen. He’s even from New Orleans! Which perhaps validates his style at least a little – although, Armstrong developed a lot of his signature stuff working the clubs in Chicago.

So, is this particularly mind-blowing? No, not really. But it is a great deal of fun, with marvellously polished performances and the rock influences integrated very nicely. Despite being the sort of cheesy old-fashioned swinger’s album that people love to dismiss, it’s actually relatively tasteful in trying to stay relevant. This is something to be thankful for, since it means that this album is fun to laugh along with, instead of at. Most of the songs are as much comedy routine as actual musical piece. “The Lip”, for example, sees songstress Keely Smith tell the story of the world’s greatest trumpeter (they call him the Lip) while each of the band mates pipes in with a guess about his identity, and Prima shares a recipe for a patented lip loosener made out of steam and fried eggs.

Elsewhere, you get the sort of sung verse/chorus/chorus compositions that are the bread and butter of this sort of blues-based stuff. It makes sense, of course, when your trumpeter is also you lead singer. The mid-way medley has some quite fine playing, for example. And then you have “Jump, Jive an’ Wail!” which is a full-on rock/r&b number that wouldn’t be at all out of place on a Ray Charles album. The horn stabs and a strong backing chorus really sell this. One great thing about Louis Prima is that, given that he’s a jazz performer, he has a much, much stronger understanding of rhythm than a lot of the guys coming out of a country background, and a technical and production sheen that Elvis’ debut, for example, could never have hoped to match – although many would argue that such very rawness and imperfection was Elvis’ chief virtue. In any event, as a consequence of his background we have an excellent dance album here, one that would have worked ten years earlier and is still fun today.

So, you can’t really deny that this was an incredibly cheesy album even when it first came out. A lot of people see the fifties as a mystical wonderland where Rock rose up and banish the horrible spectre of crap old people’s music, as of course nothing other than rock music is worth listening to. Those people, mostly teenagers, shit me. This is a big-slice of self-consciously goofy nonsense. It plays very heavily to the Italian crowd with songs like “Just a Gigolo” and “Buena Sera”, but hey, it’s Louis Prima. This is the sort of stuff that you’d expect to hear in a party scene in Goodfellas or The Godfather, after all. But, nonetheless, it’s really good. There’s nothing ironic in my enjoyment of this. It’s a big, joyous lump of corny fun.

In comparison to the previous two albums this is positively lavish sounding, although it’s still just a band in a recording studio with a very “live” feel. The personnel is obvious rather small (only 8 people – no Ellingtonian excesses here), but the sound is full and everything is nicely miked. Keely Smith has a wonderful, rich voice, although unfortunately she only sings lead on “The Lip”. She sings lead on “The Lip” and it’s arguably the best song! Why no more lead vocals for Ms. Smith, Mr. Prima? Well, that’s ok – you’ve got a fine voice too.

Anyway, the album closes with the one-two punch of the blues standard “Night Train” (fine, but not about to knock James Brown’s version off the top) and “(I’ll Be Glad When Your Dead) You Rascal”, which incorporates “When the Saints Come Marching In” into the solos on the chorus. And then the trumpet and sax start doing long siren calls! It’s quite neat. There’s a very even mix of rock, jazz and pop here, with a decent level of energy sustained throughout. You could dance to it, but you could also sit around talking and drinking.

And in the end, isn’t that what this is about? I may seem like an idiot for thinking that Louis Prima made a better rock album than Elvis Presley, but come-on, man! This is fine cocktail stuff! Prima claims to have wanted to capture the feel of 3 AM at the Sands, and damn it he did it! I wish there were more of this on this list. Can you believe, not a single proper exotica album? Ritual of the Savage came out in 1951! That’s a fully-realised concept album a whole four years before Sinatra! Hypnotique is utterly gorgeous and influenced the entire 90s post-rock scene. And where the hell is my Julie London? Maybe she’s no Ella Fitzgerald, but she cut albums at least as good as Prima. I guess maybe this list needs a little more novelty? Sabu doesn’t count – that’s at least vaguely authentic.

Anyway, I really like this. It’s fun and unassuming and I feel absolutely no shame in embracing it. You can see its fingerprints on everything from the 90s zoot suit revival to early Serge Gainsbourg-penned ye-ye numbers. It’s not cheesy! It’s cool. And next time I’m in Lygon Street I can strike-up a conversation with one of the mob bosses about good old Louis. I can never hope to be a made man, but I might get to see a man made-a-dade-a-doodooz-oodle zappity zippity boo.

7.5/10

Louis Prima - The Lip.mp3

3. The Louvin Brothers - Tragic Songs of Life (1956)

Tracks: Kentucky//I'll Be All Smiles Tonight//Let her Go, God Bless Her//What is Home Without Love?//A Tiny Broken Heart//In the Pines//Alabama//Katie Dear//My Brother's Will//Knoxville Girl//Take the News to Mother//Mary of the Wild Moor

A plain-speaking title for a plain-speaking album – and it’s this very matter-of-factness that gives it strength. The performances on this album are immaculate – Ira and Charley Louvin possess two of the finest voices I’ve heard in a long time, and they bring this considerable prowess to bear on the “close-harmony” style of bluegrass they’re working in here. The mono mix twists their voices together until they almost sound like one person, the lines of melody folding over one another beautifully. It sounds like nothing so much as a piano accordion, actually – but that’s hardly a bad thing.

Add to this the understated but highly capable mandolin and guitar work of the duo, laid over a bare framework of bass fiddle and snare drum, and it’s all very simple but very beautiful. None of the songs hurry – they’re all in the same time, at roughly the same BPM. In fact, this is virtually archetypal country music – a bluegrass blueprint, right down to the amazingly depressing lyrics. I mentioned plain-speaking? Well, imagine how positively chilling this album becomes when “Knoxville Girl” appears. The ballad of a man who meets a girl and beats her to death to halt her “dark roving eyes”, it’s very creepy stuff. Or the cover of the Carter Family’s “I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight”, a song originally written from the perspective of a young woman which the Louvins don’t even change the gender pronouns in. It gives everything an oddness – this is, I suppose the core of old folk music. The song tells a story, and it’s the story that evokes the emotions. It’s simply the Louvins’ job to document it all with their astonishing voices.

It’s the technical prowess and the strong song selections that really sell this album to modern ears. “Let Her Go” is a sad reflection on lost love that cops the “Sometimes I get a strange notion/to jump in the river and drown” from “Goodnight Irene”. “In the Pines” is a more expansive version of the song familiar to most as “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, and while it might not match the Ledbelly version it’s a very haunting presentation in its own right, with some absolutely beautiful wordless harmonising between the verses that drags pictures of the mountains right up before your eyes.

However, given all the spookery and macabre goings-ons, it’s perhaps somewhat surprising that the most affecting song on the album is actually a rather sweet and innocent little song. “A Tiny Broken Heart” takes the form of a monologue from a six year old boy begging his father to do something to stop the family of itinerants working at the next door farm from moving away and taking their little daughter with them. It’s stuff like this that encapsulates the album – on the one hand, it’s utter cornball, but on the other it’s genuinely and deeply affecting. Another fine song is “Katie Dear”, telling the surreal story of two kids whose parents each keep a knife by them to murder anyone they should happen to fall in love with. It’s very twisted.

I suppose, however, that no album is perfect. If there’s one real complaint it’s that the vocals often lack the sort of heavily invested emotion that we tend to expect from pop music. This is an extremely rigid, formal album. Its restraint gives it great tightness and unity, but on the same hand it does leave a want of breathing space in the music, and can the tracks can bleed together a little.

Still, very fine. I can’t think of much else to say about this. If you strip the rock out of Patsy Cline or polish-up an old Carter Family record you’ll get a pretty good impression of what’s on offer, but it’s all done so damned well. It’s a very strange and touching album.

8 /10

The Louvin Brothers - Knoxville Girl.mp3

2. Elvis Presley - Elvis Presley (1956)

A: Blue Suede Shoes//I'm Counting on You//I Got A Woman//One-Sided Love Affair//I Love You Because//Just Because

B: Tutti Frutti//Trying to Get to You//I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry//I'll Never Let You Go (Li' Darlin')//Blue Moon//Money Honey

Well, this is something of a contrast. Where Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours constitutes a coherent, polished statement drawn from a single, focused recording period, Elvis Presley shows more or less the exact opposite trend – a mish-mash of left-over country recordings from Elvis’ days at Sun with a selection of harder-driving R&B numbers recorded with his new pals at RCA the following year. This is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there’s a great breadth of material here – from straight-up country, to rockabilly to R&B, to pop – but on the other, not all the material is up to the standards set by the best tracks. Nothing here is really bad, per se – but the haphazard nature of the album’s construction shows. “I’m Counting on You” displays astonishing vocal control, but Elvis’ soaring and twisting vocals ultimately sound a little foolish over the modest country backing – he’s got an incredible voice, with one hell of a range, but doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with it here. “I Love You Just Because” is a much more successful attempt at the same thing, with some very soulful crooning in the upper register, even if he sounds almost unrecognisable.

Perhaps his finest vocal performances appear on two of the ballads at the end of the album. “I’ll Never Let You Go” and “Blue Moon” both feature a subdued backing of little more than bass and guitar. The former soars along with a beautiful, feminine R&B vocal in the Inkspots vein that suddenly erupts into a chugging bit of rock. “Blue Moon” is arguably the best song on the album. The bass is a primitive “walking” rhythm and the guitar clops like horse hooves in a simple repeating figure. There’s almost nothing there, and it gives a chance for Elvis to deliver an utterly arresting performance (courtesy, partly, of what sounds like a very fine echo chamber, I will grant). His falsetto vocalese across the bridge is beautiful – a trumpet couldn’t have done it better (and why is it that I keep praising so many Hart/Rodgers tunes?). Despite the fact that Elvis is remembered primarily as a rocker, I’d argue his true strength always rested in his crooning. I mean, the guy was a gospel singer for Pete’s sake! He knew crooning! Although, regrettably, no gospel appears on this album – Elvis was, at this time, the King of Rock and Roll, yet to crawl from the schoolgirl’s bed and endear himself to the housewife – and Gospel at the time actually being religious music, it wasn’t exactly sexual dynamite. It’s a pity – his driving approach to Gospel and R&B in the 60s is what really endears him to me.

“But Thomas!” you cry. “What about the Rock & Roll! Nobody cares about mellow pop music, man – this guy broke rock and changed the world! Talk about that!”. Well, okay then. I guess the reason I focus upon Elvis’ voice is because that’s where his true strength lies. He didn’t write, and he wasn’t much of a guitar player (there is some very able assistance on this album from no less a man than Chet Atkins). The rock here, is, however, pretty damn good. Did you need me to tell you that? Well, a song’s spending fifty years at the core of the pop canon may tend to colour people’s perceptions of it. The principal charm in the music is how feral it is. The version here of Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” lacks the heavy, measured thuds of the original, but makes-up for it with being a pure explosion of energy. It’s the whole punk rock thing – Elvis was pure youth distilled, shooting out of the speakers like white hot ejaculate to impregnate the teens of the world with rebellion. Or something. You don’t need me to tell you that the fifties were a pretty buttoned-down time, and that all the bored, middle class kids needed something wild and freaky to shake them up. Elvis, all his musical merits aside, had the image. He freaked-out the squares. He may not have been as good a rock & roller as, say, Little Richard – especially not judging by his cover of “Tutti Frutti”, which is rather anaemic compare to the original, salvaged by a marvellous guitar solo compensating for Elvis’ little boy vocals – but, if you want to get down to it and say what we’ve all been thinking, he had the one thing that mattered: he was hot he was white.

This isn’t to discredit the guy. He’s done a great album here. But rock music had been around a fair while before Elvis and he doesn’t do much that’s new or particularly accomplished. His main importance in the history of music comes from his popularisation of rock in white, middle class homes. If you do want to give credit, however, then even though Elvis may not have produced many innovations here, he did present one important formal shift. Elvis Presley is an enormously cosmopolitan album – Ray Charles covers sitting right beside Appalachian balladeering and the old-fashion rattle-and-hum Blues of “Just Because”. That Elvis Presley manages to push forward so many different styles on one album, and sometimes within one song, and do it for the better part quite well, is something of an achievement in shaking-up what was, at the time, a very carefully segregated pop-music landscape. And, considering that so many of the rockers to come after him took Elvis as a direct model, that seems pretty damned important.

Now, you could argue that Elvis “stole” “black” music. Maybe he did. I don’t know. Maybe New Orleans jazz stole French marching music. Granted, I don’t know if the New Orleans jazz movement ever set about systematically exploiting a host of white marching bands in the aftermath of their discovery, but anyway. You can’t really argue that the musical landscape isn’t much richer as a consequence of all this sort of thing. “Heartbreak Hotel” opened a floodgate (well, Little Richard and Fats Domino may have been important too). Black dudes got played on the radio! Is that a bad thing? Maybe I could do without all the people who insist that the Beatles and their imitators are the be-all and end-all of pop music, but oh well. At least we got Elvis’ killer phrasing on the chorus of “Sit Right Down and Cry” in compensation – it’s probably the one moment where his rock vocals really kick in, arguably the sound of the guy finding his rough edge, which would work so well later on in instances such as, say, the King Creole soundtrack.

Anyway, to further digress (and I suppose, given the importance of Elvis, I might as well), it does make a fair bit of sense. People these days tend to fall into one of two camps – those who, for some reason, think that Elvis just sort of sat down one day and invented rock music, and those who on the other hand argue that a bunch of white guys showed-up and simply lifted it from the black scene wholesale. Both of these are inaccurate, although the latter has far more truth than the former. Basically, trad rock is a hybridisation of “white” country & western and hillbilly music - originating in a complex mixture of Eastern European, Spanish and British folk styles - and rhythm & blues. The restructuring of country around a blues back-beat, coupled with adoption of the 12-bar structure, led to the “rockabilly” style that lead more or less into conventional rock a-la Buddy Holly (see also: Chubby Checker). At least, I think that’s how it went. Obviously, the styles that developed more directly out of R&B have a very different origin, but if you want to look at Elvis as the prototypical rocker – and given that he probably had the most defining influence on the direction of early rock, it seems fair – then this album is actually a very honest mixture of the various elements that would lead to, say, The Beatles, I suppose.

Of course most musicians, Elvis included, simply plucked willy-nilly from the Blues tradition, thus shooting my theory to shit. But hey!

Anyway. So, this is a very promising debut. The sound of the recordings is very raw, and cheap, but it works. Everything is sort of up in the air – Elvis was a live performer, after all, and this captures that live feel quite nicely. There’s an invigorating energy and a certain panache that glosses over the album’s numerous flaws like a solid local act playing on the marquis at a street festival. It’s all fine stuff, and it lead to one of the most bizarre and fruitful careers in pop music. Elvis would remain hit-and-miss for the rest of his career, but the hits were usually worth it.

7/10

Elvis Presley - I'll Never Let You Go.mp3

1. Frank Sinatra - In the Wee Small Hours (1955)

A: In the Wee Small Hours//Mood Indigo//Glad to be Unhappy//I Get Along Without You Very Well//Deep in a Dream//I See Your Face Before Me//Can't We Be Friends?//When Your Lover Has Gone

B: What is this Thing Called Love?//Last Night When We Were Young//I'll Be Around//Ill Wind//It Never Entered My Mind//Dancing on the Ceiling//I'll Never Be The Same//This Love of Mine

As well as being a beautiful accomplishment in its own right, In the Wee Small Hours represents on a formal level the “arrival”, as it were, of the album as album. In 1955, the LP format was still relatively new – Columbia had debuted the 33 1/3 RPM long-player in 1948, appropriately reissuing Sinatra’s own The Voice as their first pop 10”. But for most people, this was just a more convenient way of packaging their songs. Artists and record companies didn’t tend to consider their albums as cohesive wholes or unified artistic statements where the songs fir together to tell a story or sustain a mood. This was understandable, given that the preceding format (which continued well into the fifties) had been, quite literally, albums. Bundles of 78s, at first, and then 33 1/3 and 45 RPM extended-players, packing a whopping two songs a side as opposed to the 78’s one, and collected into packets like a photo album. A somewhat fragmentary approach is therefore understandable – almost everyone was in the habit of thinking of the song as more or less stand-alone.

Now, Sinatra may not have invented the concept album (So and So Sings the Works Of packages had been around a while), but he did pioneer it as a form, and In the Wee Small Hours constitutes the first perfect crystallisation of his approach. It was the first 12” he recorded, and he decided to do things a bit differently. He’d been working on this whole “album as a cohesive whole” thing for a while, and this gave him a nice opportunity to do things right. As a consequence, this isn’t just a collection of songs – it’s almost a suite.

Taking the recently-completed title track as his starting point, Sinatra worked closely with the arranger Nelson Riddle in building-up a song selection that followed-on from the melancholy attitude of “In the Wee Small Hours”. The album was supposedly structured around Sinatra’s recent break-up with Ava Gardner (and honestly, if you’d lost Ava Gardner you’d be pretty bummed too), with the consequent thread being one of near-suicidal depression and longing. Sinatra and co also took pains to include only songs recorded specifically for this LP, and as a consequence the sound of the album is perfectly consistent.

And what a sound! I have this on vinyl, and the deep, slightly murky quality is a perfect complement to the lush orchestral backings. Despite normally preferring the clarity of a CD, I must bow here to vinyl nuts. The depth of the bass, near-inaudible cello and the sparkling piano all blends together as though it were underwater. It forms a deep red backdrop out of which Frank emerges, sounding almost more like one of the woodwinds he’s sharing space with than a human voice. And the arrangements! For the most part, Riddle doesn’t grand-stand – this is Frank’s show the whole way through, and the music sticks to serving the vocals in a beautiful way. But now and then, something with leap out and drop you. The clarinet opening side-two on “What is the Thing Called Love” leaps out with a gorgeous, hypnotic blues figure that’s doubled throughout the song by a lush set of violins. Elsewhere, bursts of beautiful saxophone soloing appear out of nowhere on *. The last track, “This Love of Mine” closes out on utterly gorgeous banks of strings fading away into a melancholy ocean. It’s reminiscent at times of Gershwin and Ellington (whose “Mood Indigo” is featured), but I don’t see how anyone could call that a bad thing.

Frank’s in fine voice here – he’s never indulgent, delivering his lines with a plain-speaking sincerity, putting just the right amount of emotion into a line without ever dipping over into the sort of over-the-top schmaltz which colours most people’s impressions of the Lounge Singer. Compare the deep, slow delivery on “Mood Indigo” with the snappy, almost conversational “Dancing on the Ceiling”. It’s the sort of song you’d expect Julie London to croon out, but Sinatra rises-up to a restrained yet “big” climax she could never match. And then there’s the gently self-mocking Hart/Rodgers number “It Never Entered My Mind”, where Sinatra delivers a full depth of emotion to the soaring line “And now I even have to scratch my back myself”.

It’s stuff like this that stops In the Wee Small Hours from becoming self-absorbed and tedious. It’s heartfelt, and maybe a little indulgent, but self-aware enough to combat this without losing that genuine quality – it’s often pretty funny, or at least wry. The song selections are top-notch – there isn’t a track worth dropping, and a great deal of variety is present within the self-imposed limitation of all the tracks being ballads (the rambling “Glad to be Unhappy” is a personal favourite of mine, with a gorgeous spoken/sung introduction). The team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenzo Hart get the most tracks, with one on side one and two on side two, “Glad to be Unhappy” and “It Never Entered My Mind” being two of the strongest on the album.

The music on this album is less of a development than the manner in which it has been selected and arranged, but that’s not to say that Riddle’s complex, subtle arrangements aren’t superb. This particular style of lushly-orchestrated jazz pop, married so closely to blues, had been chugging along fine for years with relatively small changes, but would be more or less obsolete by the end of the sixties. Orchestral pop did get by, mostly by more funky) realms, but these sorts of standards-collections have unfortunately at this point in time reached a nadir (Rod Stewart, anyone?). And this collection itself isn’t flawless – as restrained as Frank is his voice does sometimes get a little bigger than the music he’s singing over can support, and while none of the songs are bad, his cover of “Mood Indigo” is a little weak, with the same to be said of “Dancing on the Ceiling”. There’s also the problem that this album is, as much as anything, a mood piece, and so some of the songs can fade into the background if you let them.

In any event, this marks an important moment in the history of popular music. The cohesiveness of the album is almost taken for granted these days, so much so that it’s one of the first things people look for when sitting down to criticise a piece of work. While the actual “concept album” in the prog-rock sense may be something of a mixed blessing, the album as artistic statement has led to some of the most amazing developments around. Could Sgt. Pepper’s exist without this (and would it be a bad thing if it didn’t)? I don’t know, maybe. Who does? More interestingly, could Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson? Would anyone want to live in such a world? Arguably more important is the matter of actually re-recording every single song for this LP specifically – it’s a level of forced dedication that is comparable in importance to the Beatles’ decision to only record songs they’d written themselves.

Thankfully, however, Frank just sings. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. People often look down on people who just sing other people’s songs. But I don’t see why. Frank Sinatra had an amazing voice and a keen artistic sense. Why the hell did he need to write his own songs? He made them his own through the power of his pipes, and the incredibly charisma he put across.

This is a gorgeous piece of work. It’s a masterpiece of understatement and the honest to god sound of a broken heart.

9/10

Mission Statement.

I have never read the popular reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I've read 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die, but that is not quite the same thing. This isn't to say that I won't read the former some day, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Inspired by the heroic lunacy of Francisco Silva and his 1001 Albums blog, I have decided to more or less copy his idea entirely, premising my endeavour on the fact that this is the Internet. There are no rules here. I can do Anythn/

I should also admit, at this point, that while I have listened to an awful lot of music I know very little about most of it. So, this will be a learning experience for the both of us - one in which I try and fail to give informed assessments of these albums, and you learn things which are patently false and which will get you laughed at by your more knowledgeable friends and university professors.

I have a bit of a backlog at the moment, so posting may race ahead a bit at first, but after that it'll be one review every day or two. I may post songs with some of the albums, but then who knows?

Well... Go too!